Book Image

PostGIS Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Pedro Wightman, Bborie Park, Stephen Vincent Mather, Thomas Kraft, Mayra Zurbarán
Book Image

PostGIS Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Pedro Wightman, Bborie Park, Stephen Vincent Mather, Thomas Kraft, Mayra Zurbarán

Overview of this book

PostGIS is a spatial database that integrates the advanced storage and analysis of vector and raster data, and is remarkably flexible and powerful. PostGIS provides support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL object-relational database and is currently the most popular open source spatial databases. If you want to explore the complete range of PostGIS techniques and expose related extensions, then this book is for you. This book is a comprehensive guide to PostGIS tools and concepts which are required to manage, manipulate, and analyze spatial data in PostGIS. It covers key spatial data manipulation tasks, explaining not only how each task is performed, but also why. It provides practical guidance allowing you to safely take advantage of the advanced technology in PostGIS in order to simplify your spatial database administration tasks. Furthermore, you will learn to take advantage of basic and advanced vector, raster, and routing approaches along with the concepts of data maintenance, optimization, and performance, and will help you to integrate these into a large ecosystem of desktop and web tools. By the end, you will be armed with all the tools and instructions you need to both manage the spatial database system and make better decisions as your project's requirements evolve.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Improving ST_Polygonize


In this short recipe, we will be using a common coding pattern in use when geometries are being constructed with ST_Polygonize and formalizing it into a function for reuse.

ST_Polygonize is a very useful function. You can pass a set of unioned lines or an array of lines to ST_Polygonize, and the function will construct polygons from the input. ST_Polygonize does so aggressively insofar as it will construct all possible polygons from the inputs. One frustrating aspect of the function is that it does not return a multi-polygon, but instead returns a geometry collection. Geometry collections can be problematic in third-party tools for interacting with PostGIS as so many third party tools don't have mechanisms in place for recognizing and displaying geometry collections.

The pattern we will formalize here is the commonly recommended approach for changing geometry collections into mutlipolygons when it is appropriate to do so. This approach will be useful not only for ST_Polygonize...